What is Yiddish?

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Overview

Yiddish was the vernacular language of most Jews in Eastern and Central Europe before World War II. Today, it is spoken by descendants of those Jews living in the United States, Israel, and other parts of the world.

The basic grammar and vocabulary of Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet, is Germanic. Yiddish, however, is not a dialect of German but a complete language‚ one of a family of Western Germanic languages, that includes English, Dutch, and Afrikaans. Yiddish words often have meanings that are different from similar words in German.

The term "Yiddish" is derived from the German word for "Jewish." The most accepted (but not the only) theory of the origin of Yiddish is that it began to take shape by the 10th century as Jews from France and Italy migrated to the German Rhine Valley. They developed a language that included elements of Hebrew, Jewish-French, Jewish-Italian, and various German dialects. In the late Middle Ages, when Jews settled in Eastern Europe, Slavic elements were incorporated into Yiddish.

YIVO & Yiddish

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded as the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland in 1925, by scholars, teachers, and other communal activists who saw the Yiddish language as the best medium for educating the Jewish population, and of giving the Jewish people access to their history and culture. The institution they developed produced ground-breaking scholarship in Yiddish and published scholarly journals, but also organized popular lectures, exhibitions, cultural evenings, and training seminars for teachers in Yiddish primary schools and high schools.

YIVO became the acknowledged authority on the Yiddish language and pioneered important linguistic research on Yiddish. The standards YIVO developed for Yiddish orthography, or spelling, and for the transliteration of Yiddish into English are the most commonly used by publishers and scholars. YIVO's Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, first published in 1968, has now appeared in several editions.

YIVO continues to serve as the "world headquarters" of the Yiddish language. Hundreds of students have attended its weekly Yiddish language courses or graduated from its intensive summer Yiddish program.